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It’s hot.  Hot, hot,  hot.  Way too fucking hot.  It’s past midnight andI’m sitting here, underwear soaked in sweat and sticking to the leather chair, even though the balcony door is open.

It’s too hot to  think.  Brexit?  Too fucking hot, leave me alone.

Heat itself, though,  does raise  the question of heat, and therefore, of global warming.  Which is real.  I sit  here and moan about  how my apartment feels  like a  sauna, when  the same rise  in temperature which causes those of us in  Prague to say “Damn, it sure is hot  today” is  enough  of a rise to speed the  melt of the glaciers in Greenland and  Anarctica, it is enough to warm the oceans enough to increase the number of hurricanes (I’m not an expert,  but I hear there is some correlation), it’s enough  to tip a crowd over the  edge  and start a riot, it’s enough to cause crops to fail and people to starve.

So, what are we going to do about  it?  Well, more trees are always good.

Helena got home late tonight so it was up  to me to make  dinner.   Maybe the kids are used to it a bit more now.  I made cheeseburgers, which they at least didn’t complain about, a plain cucumber and tomato side salad which they ignored entirely, and then we had ice cream and watermelon for desert, because even I  can’t  screw up watermelon and ice cream.

Helena was late because she’s been taking a course on Thursday nights.  Tonight was the  last night, though, and she’s got a neat little diploma that say “Rhetorician” on it.  The course  title  was Rhetoric, but I guess that’s the same as public speaking.

I guess she figures improving her public speaking abilities will come in handy in her job, and it certainly will.  It’s not the main aspect of her job (she’s the marketing manager for the property  development companywhich manages Palladium.), but the need can arise.

I see lots of side  benefits, though.  If you’ve got the confidence and the moxie to speak in front of a group of people, then you’ve got the confidence and moxie to do anything.  Next  thing you know she’ll be bungy jumping an swimming  withvthev

sharks.

Midnight and I have to wake up at 5:30 in the morning so this blog is going to be a frenetic attempt to string together at least 250 words and finish in less than 10 minutes, which is a writing exercise  in its own  right and, you never can tell, I figure the odds be 50/50, I just might have some thing to say.

It was a relatively uneventful day today, but I did start work on a new poem, it’s going to be a long one, the  kind I get sort of a vague idea for and then hammer away at for weeks and they are, admittedly, usually not my best poems, the best ones are usually the very short ones, eight lines are less, that spring more or less unbidden from the mind and they’re on  the page before I’ve fully digested them  myself, leaving  me with the somewhat disconcerting notion that I’m not even  the smartest person inside my own head, whereas the long ones always wind up with  some forced lines interrupting the  flow and they leave audiences cold and so, since I’m writing to try and communicate with other people and not just for myself or aiming at some abstract concept of artistic purity, I should avoid  them but, hope springs eternal and  I figure if I keep  swinging for the fences eventually I’ll hit one out of the park, and that’s what I want.

The idea of the poem is that being human means always wanting more,  it’s notaboutgreed, although that, too, but  always wanting more knowledge, new stimulation, more and greater methods of entertainment, to always go beyond what was considered the best,the top,the apex of the field.
Everybody wants to change the game, to establish a new paradigm, to really shake things up.  At least,enough people do to guarantee that things will always  be shaken up and, as  is for an individual, so it is for the species and we are going to keep moving forward, like it or not, as inexorably as a twig caught in the current.

Well, just got back from watching a football game.  Not my choice.  My first instinct,when Sam asked if he  could go there with  his friends, was to say no.  You can’t stay out till 11 on a school night, we don’t want you out that late at all without an adult, and you’re too  obsessed with football,anyway.

But Helena said “Well, why don’t you go  with him, and  it’s not much of a school night,  the year’s  almost over, their grades are fixed, and we’re down to the last week and a half or so, which is all fooling  around.”  Once Helena weighs in, I know I’ve lost the argument.

It was kind of  an interesting atmosphere, I must admit.  They had a stage and a big screen TV set up in  a park by the river, and there were plenty of places  around selling  food, and other attractions, it was like a fair.  From the stage there  were giveaways, they  were kicking footballs  into  the crowd, a kid standing right next to me caught  one.
The screen was big  and high definition enough, you could see the  details of the game very clearly, (European Cup Football, live from Paris, Czech Republic v. Turkey)and it was kind of a bloody game, lots of head butting, a few points where the blood was flowing.

We lost, 0-2, which means we’re not advancing from the  group.  On the one hand, that’s a bummer.  On the other, I won’t have to attend any more football games for  a while.

Right now I’m watching a true stories about ghosts program, and they’re talking about how they knew their house was haunted because their rabbits were always scared and running and hiding.  Come on, do these people not realize that’s just what rabbits do – Oh, wait, shit, Thumper died!?  Romeo, too??  O.K., maybe I shouldn’t be laughing at these people.

I love watching shows about alien encounters but there’s one I watch sometimes and it’s a team of ‘experts,’ i.e. true believers.  It’s just ridiculous what evidence they accept.

I still like Animal Planet sometimes, but damn, there are other animals besides alligators, and the most interesting aspect of alligators is the alligators, not the dumbass rednecks who trap them and get them out of people’s swimming pools.
Also, I’m a bit tired of watching people fishing.  You can call it ‘River Monsters’ or ‘Deadliest Catch’ it is still just programs about people fishing.
Discovery does that a lot, too.  Shows about people driving trucks, or cutting down trees, or mining for gold, and talking like total dumbass rednecks the whole time.  Even sometimes with a supposed science program, it’s got to be narrated by a couple of dudes saying Har har har, we may have PhD.’s, but we’re really just dumb rednecks who like blowing shit up.

Why? Why?  Why do we have this universal compulsion to listen to people who talk like morons?  I don’t really know.  That’s why I’m asking.